I am asking my professional advisers & others who hold my personal data either to confirm that they do not use Facebook, or that they will totally dispense with it within a month; failing which they loose my business.

Ha! Here in the USA that would reduce your choices of businesses, associations, etc. to almost none. I suppose you can buy a Tesla...Tell us how it goes and the responses you get.

This article talks about how FB is practically indispensable for many people. I suspect this varies a lot in different parts of the world, but for many people FB is the "Internet." In other words, that's about the only place where they do anything online.

I saw this all coming the moment I first heard of Facebook, and no one in my family is involved with FB at all.

I have decided that if something I'm looking at doing requires Facebook, then I don't need to do it.

Am I missing out on parts of the world? Well, sure--but those are clearly the unimportant parts.

Life is full of choices and tradeoffs. This is an easy choice to make, and was from day 1.

Frankly, I'm disappointed and not a little disturbed that SO MANY people jumped into FB with both feet and ignored, or couldn't see, the incredible downside. I hate to think I live in that world where people can't see past their noses and "but how will I stay connected with my (put relationship here)???"

The average FB user is not really worried because they only share what they don't mind sharing! My wife uses it more than I do because her friends use it. They don't use it for much other than chatting amongst themselves and looking at each other's news feeds, but she ignores 90% of the garbage. Similarly, I use Twitter as my own personal news feed and I hardly ever see all the horrible stuff people are complaining about. If I don't like what someone writes I just unfollow them or block them. I only use FB to manage a business page. There are lots of people on FB who use it in a way that gives them value, even if others do not.

The average FB user is not really worried because they only share what they don't mind sharing! My wife uses it more than I do because her friends use it. They don't use it for much other than chatting amongst themselves and looking at each other's news feeds, but she ignores 90% of the garbage. Similarly, I use Twitter as my own personal news feed and I hardly ever see all the horrible stuff people are complaining about. If I don't like what someone writes I just unfollow them or block them. I only use FB to manage a business page. There are lots of people on FB who use it in a way that gives them value, even if others do not.

It gives them something, but that something comes at a very high cost (that's well hidden)--and that makes the value pretty much zero.

"what they don't mind sharing" has nothing to do with it. FB has spent billions of dollars on monetizing things about their members that even the members don't realize, because they think that "I don't share that kind of information" when in fact FB gets that information based on the member's interactions and activities.

Talk to some actual FB users--I have. They could care less about any of the hullabaloo over FB privacy issues. They never thought that anything they did there was private and they really don't care. I am not one of them, but there was no expectation of privacy for most of them. Remember, in almost any situation like this there will be a loud minority griping, while the silent majority is onto something else. I haven't heard or read of any mass movements away from FB. I can tell you that our FB business page is seeing greater traffic than ever due to some local issues and some FB ads we are running. Here's an article on what is really happening--FB is growing.

I would argue too that the "very high cost" is a bit of hyperbole. All of this information is being used for targeted advertising and fake news. Anyone with half a brain knows that there is tons of fake news flying around, and it doesn't take much critical reading to debunk most of it. I think most people just ignore it just like they ignore most advertising they see. I really think that companies are wasting most of their ad dollars because most of their so-called targeted ads are just a waste of time. I know that I see a ton of "targeted" stuff that is totally irrelevant to me, if I even bother to glance at it. Are some of the ads relevant--sure! But, I would rather see some relevant ads than ones that have no interest to me. On desktop I use an adblocker to remove most of it. On our phones most of us have been trained by crappy ads to simply ignore most of them.

The Cambridge Analytics data scandal at Facebook and the subsequent call from TV presenter and cabaretier Arjan Lubach for people to delete their Facebook profile have in fact had little influence on the use of Facebook by Dutch people over the past months.